UN Official Dr. Mazlan Othman to be the First Contact with Extraterrestrials

The United Nations is set to appoint the head of its Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) as the first official responsible for representing humanity in the case of contact with extraterrestrial life. At an upcoming Royal Society (of London) conference scheduled from October 4-5, Dr Mazlan Othman will explain how the UN plans to implement changes that will result in her being given responsibility as part of her current position as the director of UNOOSA. Othman says the need for such a responsibility is due to the discovery of exoplanets that makes it more likely than ever that humanity will eventually discover extraterrestrial life. She has said that the UN is now actively planning a coordinated response for ‘First Contact’ .

Othman is a respected figure in the astrophysics and Outer Space Affairs community. She was the first female to graduate with a Ph.D in astrophysics from the University of Otago New Zealand (1981) and became Malaysia’s first astrophysicist. She was nominated by Kofi Annan to head UNOOSA from 1999 to 2002, before being summoned back to Malaysia to head the Malaysian National Space Agency from 2002-2007. She was responsible for the training and flight of Malaysia’s first astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, and was re-appointed head of UNOOSA by the current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, in 2007. As far as Othman’s scientific expertise is concerned, Professor Richard Crowther, a space law expert at the United Kingdom’s space agency said: “Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a ‘take me to your leader’ person”.

In a recent talk Othman said:

The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that some day human kind will receive signals from extraterrestrials. When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination.

At the October 4-5 Royal Society conference, Othman will go into detail in the process the UN plans to undertake to appoint her as humanity’s first representative for First Contact. The Conference is titled “Towards a scientific and societal agenda on extra-terrestrial life,” and its webpage explains the need for political processes to accommodate scientific study of extraterrestrial life:

Even more than the scientific agenda, a corresponding complementary societal agenda needs to be debated. With a mix of invited talks and panel debates, we particularly look into the detection of life, the communication with potential extra-terrestrial civilizations, the implications for the future of humanity, and the political processes that are required.”

Othman will present at a panel discussion titled: “Extra-terrestrial life and arising political issues for the UN agenda.”

Othman’s position shows that the United Nations is closely monitoring scientific developments concerning the discovery of exoplanets and the growing likelihood that life can be found throughout the universe. Recently, renowned astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking caused a furor when he said that extraterrestrial life is almost certain to exist, but we should be careful since they are likely to be predatory in nature. Hawking’s exopolitical speculations has stimulated wide ranging debate over the motivations of advanced extraterrestrial life. As a member of the Royal Society, Hawking’s views very likely played a role in influencing the agenda of the upcoming Royal Society conference.

The upcoming UN announcement of a First Contact official comes at a convenient time for a grass roots effort to get the City of Denver to pass an Ordinance, Initiative 300, that will create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission. Initiative 300 is on the ballot for the November mid-term elections and deals with some of the same “First Contact” issues that Othman will be given responsibility for at the UN. For example, the proposed Ordinance asks:

Shall the voters for the City and County of Denver adopt an Initiated Ordinance to require the creation of an extraterrestrial affairs commission to help ensure the health, safety, and cultural awareness of Denver residents and visitors in relation to potential encounters or interactions with extraterrestrial intelligent beings or their vehicles, and fund such commission from grants, gifts and donations?

It will certainly be difficult to dismiss the importance of Denver’s proposed Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission if the UN moves forward with its plans to appoint Othman as the official responsible for First Contact, and the Royal Society endorses political processes to deal with the detection of extraterrestrial life.

The upcoming appointment of a UN official to be in charge of a future First Contact scenario is a welcome step forward in legitimating discussion about the social and political implications of extraterrestrial life. Such a political discussion – popularly known as exopolitics – is the explicit focus of the upcoming Royal Society Conference. Uthman’s upcoming responsibility makes it more important than ever that the academic/scientific community discusses the social and political implications of the discovery of extraterrestrial life, and the growing likelihood of First Contact.

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Posted in: alien life,entities,extraterrestrials,first contact,human kind,mazlan othman,space agency,UN

Search For Life in the Right Places

Curious about just how astrobiologists plan to make good on their goal to find life in space in the next 20 years? 

The first will take place later this year, when Russian scientists will tap Earth’s final frontier, the subglacial Antarctic lakes. Any life they find under 2.5 miles of ice in the ancient isolated waters of Lake Vostok won’t technically be extraterrestrial, of course, but it could be new and bizarre – and akin to what’s possibly living in the suspected subsurface oceans on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. 

Martians could also be on the horizon. With all the attention the Red Planet gets, it should come as no surprise that NASA’s next big flagship mission is headed there. Later this decade the agency will begin a long-term project to bring Mars rocks back to Earth. Many think the Mars Sample Return mission could be the one that finally finds ET (even if it is a long-dead microbe, not a little green man).

If we don’t find aliens in our own backyard, they could be lurking in other solar systems. As soon as next decade, a Terrestrial Planet Finder mission -- something like the New World’s Observer telescope and starshade in our gallery -- will look for signs of life in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets around other stars.

Here on the ground, the Allen Telescope Array, the first instrument completely devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), could analyze enough star systems to come across alien radio transmissions in the next two decades – if the SETI Institute’s new crowd-sourced funding campaign pulls through. Read more about how and when we’ll find life (and what it could look like) in our online-only interview with Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Institute. 

And, just for fun, we’ve also included a round-up of some of our favorite close encounters with “aliens,” including a 1966 UFO chase in Ohio and (possible) microbes on a meteorite announced earlier this year. Happy hunting!

Drilling For Extreme Life

For the past 20 million years, Lake Vostok has been sealed beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. This winter, after nearly 22 years of work, Russian researchers will use mechanical and thermal drills to punch through the final 100 feet before liquid water. Microbes found in Vostok could inform the search for life on the Jovian ice moon Europa, for which a mission could launch in the next decade, and other moons in our solar system thought to contain bodies of liquid water, such as Enceladus and Ganymede.

 

Drilling For Extreme Life: How It Works

THE SITE

Vostok Station once recorded the lowest temperature on Earth: –128ºF. Fortunately for researchers, average temperatures in the austral summer hover around –33º.The Russian team will commence drilling in December. Once scientists reach liquid water, they will allow water to rise up the borehole and freeze over the winter. They will return to Vostok Station in December 2012 to test the core for life.

THE DRILL

A thermal drill tethered to a power cable from the surface will penetrate the final 30 feet of ice. When the drill approaches the water surface, pressure and water sensors will trigger an expandable borehole packer to seal off the channel, preventing drilling fluid from contaminating the lake and allowing scientists to control how quickly the water will rise.

THE LAKE

Lake Vostok, one of the world’s largest lakes by volume, contains more than 1,000 cubic miles of water. At its farthest depths, some 14,000 feet below the surface, pressure reaches up to 438 atmospheres. If drilled improperly, the pressurized water could race up the borehole, causing an explosion powerful enough to destroy Vostok Station.

  

Bringing Mars Home

To determine whether life lives or has lived on Mars, scientists will most likely need to bring a sample of the planet back to Earth. The threestage NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission, scheduled to run from 2018 to 2027, will involve rovers, a launcher, and an orbiter equipped with an Earth Entry Vehicle (EEV) that will carry the rocks to Earth for testing. 

PHASE ONE, 2019-2021: COLLECT AND CACHE

Following launch in 2018, a rover will arrive on Mars in January 2019 and will spend nearly two years collecting rocks with a rotary coring drill. After placing as many as 40 cores in a three-inch-wide cylindrical cache, the mobile ’bot will return to its landing site and place the container on the ground.

PHASE TWO, 2025-2026: FETCH AND LAUNCH

A lander carrying the fetch rover and Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will touch down on Mars in September 2025. Over the next three months, the rover will retrieve the cache—up to a nine-mile round-trip journey—and package the rocks in an 11-pound Orbiting Sample (OS) sphere stored inside the MAV. By the following May, the MAV rocket will launch and release the OS into orbit.

PHASE THREE, 2026-2027: RENDEZVOUS AND RETURN

An orbiter will arrive at Mars in the summer of 2023. The craft will use optical and radio-frequency tracking systems to monitor the OS launch and will rendezvous with the samples in around May 2026. The orbiter will capture the OS in a basket and transfer it to the onboard eeV—a three-foot-wide, impact-resistant, heat-shielded craft—before setting out for Earth. On descent to Earth in late 2027, the EEV will decouple from the orbiter and crash-land on the planet. The quarantined samples would then be safely recovered.

 Spotting Distant Life

To view life on other worlds, scientists will need to use a space-based telescope to scan for biosignatures in an exoplanet’s atmosphere while blocking out starlight that could skew results. The New Worlds Observer, a design developed at the University of Colorado, pairs an ultraviolet-optical-infrared telescope with an external starshade.

THE STARSHADE

The 160-foot-wide starshade moves independently to position itself between the telescope and the star. Its 16 “petals” diffract light away from the center of the shadow it casts onto the observatory. 

THE TELESCOPE

The observatory’s 13-foot aperture will collect enough ultraviolet and infrared light reflecting off the planet to distinguish it from interplanetary dust. Future telescope designs will also probably incorporate an internal coronagraph, a device on the instrument that will blot out starlight that slips past the shade.

 Searching For New Earths

In 1995 a Swiss team scanning the Milky Way discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. Since then, scientists using ground-based and space telescopes have found more than 500 exoplanets in the galaxy. Currently only one, Gliese 581 d is considered a potential Earth analogue—it may even have oceans—but the number will grow. Kepler, a photometric telescope that points toward the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, could find as many as 3,000 new worlds by the end of the decade.

 Do Good, Find Aliens

In April, after the National Science Foundation and the state of California cut funding for radio astronomy, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at Hat Creek Radio Observatory, the SETI Institute’s primary listening post, went dark for the first time in nearly four years. The ATA scans deep space for alien radio signals, which some scientists say could be our best chance of finding intelligent life.

To replace the estimated $5 million it will cost to get the ATA back online full time for two years, SETI introduced a new program called SETIStars in June. For $15, donors can sponsor three-minute blocks of telescope data. In March, SETI launched the beta version of another program, a citizen-science application called setiQuest Explorer. Amateur alien hunters will be able to analyze radio-telescope data for signs of contact on their computers, tablet or mobile phone. The institute’s public outreach is paying off. By August, SETIStars had generated more than $200,000, enough to turn the ATA back on, at least for a little while.

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Posted in: alien life,europa,extraterrestrials,jupiter,mars,orbiter,Search For Life in the Right Places,SETI Institute

Finding E.T. We Will Lose God?

Probably one of the highest risk/reward activity in modern science is being conducted by a very small group of astronomers: the search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations (SETI). Because they are trying to answer a purely hypothetical question, SETI astronomers certainly have detractors that wonder if the pursuit is worth even a modest investment.

            But answering the question “are we alone?” would have a profound cultural and theological impact on our view of our place in the universe.

             A panel of experts pondering this question were at opposite ends of the universe at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington D.C. Emphasizing that radio and optical searches are growing exponentially, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute predicted contact with E.T. within 20 years, “if our precepts are correct.” In other words, SETI observations over the past two years have cast a bigger net over the galaxy than in the previous 50 years of searching. 

            Howard Smith of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was downright dour, however. He reiterated his strident thesis that was picked up by a British tabloid two week earlier: There's nobody out there. Intelligent life is highly improbable. Or, at least it’s highly improbable we’ll ever find it, he said.

         

              The shortcoming of Smith’s hypothesis is that it is blatantly pre-Copernican thinking -- that Earth holds a special place in the universe. His conclusions subtly flirt with the idea we are the only fruit of God’s handiwork. And, in that context, he is eager to emphasize our critical need for stewardship over this planet. "We are probably alone and will have to solve our own problems," he said.

              Astronomical discoveries over the past 400 years have consistently reasserted the Copernican Principle -- the latest being the Kepler Space Telescope’s harvest of over 1,200 planets orbiting other stars.

              As Smith tried to whittle away at the number of potentially habitable Kepler exoplanets, Shostak couldn’t resist taking a goal shot. Extrapolating from the Kepler data, he estimated that there are at least 10 trillion trillion Earth-like planets in the entire universe. “You would have to believe in miracles if E.T. did not exist!” he asserted.

             

             Smith countered with The Fermi Paradox. If alien civilizations all around us some would be smart enough to travel faster than light and they’d be here by now. So, if aliens exist at all, they are not that clever. Nor have they been able to come and conquer us, which would have a statistical probability in a universe teeming infinite worlds. There’s gotta be at least one Darth Vader out there somewhere.

            The esteemed Harvard science historian, Owen Gingerich, dismissed this debate by simply saying, “We cannot extrapolate from just one example of intelligent life.”

Nevertheless, this dialogue leaves me as optimistic as ever of finding E.T. In fact I would say it is a 50/50 bet that SETI tells us that “we are not alone” before the great space observatories needed for conclusively finding Earth II are ever built. That is, assuming aliens uses radio or optical transmissions for saying “hi.”

            But what would happen next?

                Shostak’s optimism is mollified by his belief the first signal detected will not be readable because of the need for larger radio telescopes with better time resolution to tease out frequency or amplitude modulation. And, even if that is accomplished, decoding the message content may remain elusive for many generations.

               We will simply know that we are not alone. This will permanently change the trajectory of our world view in ways similar to the Copernican revolution, discovery of the New World, or Darwinism.

               The AAAS participants pondered how finding E.T. would impact the great world religions. Surveys show that only 10 percent of religious people think that such a discovery would challenge their view of God. In fact the popular evangelist Billy Graham belied in extraterrestrials.

               The teachings of Islam are a bit ambivalent on this question said Nidhal Guessoum of the American University of Sharjar, United Arab Emirates. The Koran says that because Allah is omnipotent, creation is ongoing in a universe full of grandeur. The Koran also describes Allah as “Lord of the Worlds,” and implies there are other Earths in the heavens.

               But the Koran also paints an ultra-anthropic view of the universe. Humans are Allah’s lieutenants and put smack-dab at the center of his creation.

The existence of E.T. would be more problematic in Christian theology.

In the “fall from Eden” as described in Genesis, the entire universe is cursed because of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve (which is a basic tenant of Catholicism). A sentient being living 10,000 light-years away may not take too kindly to this idea. Imagine, the alien is supposed to believe that it’s doomed to death and judgment because a small-cranium naked biped living on a subgiant rocky planet once bit into a spheroid of carbohydrates, sugars, and water.

The essence of Christianity is redemption through God’s sacrifice of his only son. Because aliens are not descended from Adam and Eve must they be separately saved too? Or did they pass the Apple Test?

Jennifer Wiseman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is optimistic that finding E.T. would exemplify the greatness of God. “We would have a wider view of creation that embraces and integrates religious and non-religious ideas.” 

              Smith said that the precepts of an all powerful creator in Judaism would accept the idea of life off the Earth. So, our first question for the aliens might be: “Got God?”

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Posted in: alien life,E.T.,extraterrestrials,god equation,planet,space,universe